Cades Cove 01 - Cades Cove: A Novel of Terror (30 page)

He stood and leaned across the desk.

“
I’ve seen many strange and wonderful things during my lifetime,” he continued. “I’m willing to bet you’ve seen strange and maybe not quite so wonderful things recently. I might be able to help you, but you must trust me. It appears a powerful asgina, or spirit, followed you home to Colorado from the ravine and isn’t ready to let go of you just yet.”

“
What do you suggest I do?” asked David, clinging to the thin hope John Running Deer might free him from the ghost’s tenacious grip.

“
The first thing I need is for you to tell me everything that’s happened from the time of your picnic in the ravine up until today,” he said, sitting down in his chair. “The more details you remember, the better our chances will be in coming up with a cure for you and your family.”

David agreed, desperate for help. To his surprise, telling his story to a relative stranger came out a hell of a lot easier than it did with Miriam or Norm. He told John almost everything, sparing only the lurid details from his dream of Norm. When he finished, the ranger sat back in his chair, his expression somber.

“
I’m not sure returning Allie Mae’s Treasures to the ravine is the answer,” he said. “As I told you, we get items all of the time. Some of the letters we’ve received over the years tell of runs of bad luck and occasional poltergeist activity that suddenly visited the lives of those who’ve taken something from the park. We try to take the things back to the exact spot they were removed from, but it hasn’t always worked out that way. We’ve rarely heard from the people again, unless they return to thank us.”

He paused to pick through the objects laid out upon his desk.

“
Your situation is different. My feeling is we should try to find Allie Mae’s relatives, since what’s here should be of value to her descendants. It might be the very thing that brings her peace in the spirit world.”

“
How do we accomplish that?” The idea of returning the bag to the ravine alone seemed more attractive to David than trying to find the owner of a partial name from a century ago.

“
It sounds like a difficult task, I know,” agreed John. “But, I’ve got a contact who works for the census bureau in Knoxville.”

“
How long do you think it would take them to find Allie’s relatives?”

“
If I call Diane today, she might have an answer for us tomorrow. Definitely by the weekend at the latest,” he said. “Keep in mind that we’re talking about a small community which never grew beyond six hundred souls.”

“
I was planning on going home tomorrow,” said David. “If worse comes to worst, I can wait here longer I suppose…. I’m not so sure Allie Mae would be as patient.”

He thought of Norm’s injuries and those administered to him and Tyler. Hell, tonight might be too late. John eyed him as if he could see the images in David’s mind.

“
I’ve been running the names I remember through my memory since we met yesterday, but I can’t recall an ‘Allie’ or ‘Allie Mae’ in any of the cove records I’ve ever seen from the end of World War I through 1934, or even among the last stragglers who finally came back to gather the belongings they left behind in the early 1950s.” He got up to get himself another cup of coffee. “Would you like more coffee, David?”

“
I’m okay at the moment, but thanks,” he said, taking another sip from his cup.

John returned to his desk with a steaming cup in hand and a less serious look on his face.

“
You know, another idea just occurred to me,” he said. “I still intend to call my friend in Knoxville before lunch, but there’s one other place we can check.”

“
Really?” David sat up straight, hopeful he could resolve this today without having to wait until Friday.

“
One of the churches in the cove needed extensive termite treatment a few years back, and several boxes of old church meetings and other notes were found in a forgotten storage area beneath the pulpit,” John told him. “I remember going through the boxes out of curiosity, and I was surprised to find guest books and other attendance ledgers. I recall seeing a few birth and death announcements too.”

“
Where are these boxes now?”

“
Just a few miles away from where we’re sitting,” said John. “They’re stored in the supply shed behind the park station I told you about. We’ve been waiting on the ‘go ahead’ to ship them to Nashville for permanent storage. I wonder sometimes if the state’s archives forgot about them being here. If you’d like to take a look through these boxes, I can take you there this afternoon, once I’ve finished my one-thirty tour.”

“
I’d like that,” said David. It could mean looking for a needle in a haystack, but his years of experience doing client audits taught him the importance of never overlooking a possible resource, since often a missing figure or answer he needed came from the most unlikely places.

“
Well then, give me a few minutes to make sure we’re staffed through one o’clock, and I’ll place the call to Knoxville,” said John. “Would you be opposed to joining me for lunch?”

“
Not at all.”

Sensing John could use the next few minutes without the extra distraction of entertaining him, he excused himself from his office, telling him he’d wait by his car in the parking lot, and offering to drive to wherever John had in mind for lunch.

Almost eleven-thirty, they arrived at a park restaurant located just outside Cades Cove. They talked about subjects that had nothing to do with Allie Mae, such as each other’s careers and families. John’s wife, the blond lady in the photograph, had passed away six years earlier from breast cancer. Her death hit their only daughter and two grand-daughters very hard. John Running Deer’s passions in life were his family and the preservation of the wilderness his forefathers cherished.

John’s last tour ended at two o’clock, leaving the rest of the afternoon free. The two men drove in John’s cruiser to the park station. Once there, they cleared a table inside his office and began bringing in the boxes.

For the next two hours they didn’t find anything helpful, though the first boxes produced an interesting assortment of documents that shed valuable light on life in Cades Cove during the two decades following World War I. John explained the community had always been unusually close knit, and that he learned to admire the people and their unique history despite his Cherokee forefathers being forced to leave the area. “They were for the most part a very caring community,” he commented, while helping David sift through church ledgers from 1919 through 1924.

They brought in the last boxes around five o’clock, when the security floodlights surrounding the station came on. Not wanting to take a break, David started in on the first of these boxes while John took a moment to relax at his desk. While absently sifting through the contents of “Allie Mae’s Treasures” spread out again on the desktop, John noticed the faint inscription on the torn locket.

He retrieved a magnifying glass and held the locket up to it. In the elaborate cursive style of the late nineteenth century Victorian period that pervaded into the early twentieth century, the inscription read:
‘To my darling granddaughter Allie on her 16
^th
Christmas, 1915’
.

“
What year are we down to?” he asked.

“
I’m just about finished looking through the ledger for 1918,” said David. “It looks like there’s several more like it still inside this box from earlier years. I can see the ones for 1916 and 1917 below what looks like a string-tied bunch of letters.”

“
Have you ever taken a close look at the locket?” John held it up by its golden chain.

“
No, I haven’t,” he said, pausing to look where John sat. Even with the aid of his reading glasses, which he remembered to carry inside his briefcase, his eyes grew tired from the time already spent reading the penned lines on the ledgers and other documents that had faded over time. If John hadn’t told him, he wouldn’t have known he held the locket in his hand. He stood up and went over to the desk to get a closer look.

“
I guess if we get any earlier than 1899 we’ll be in deep shit,” David observed dryly, after John showed him the inscription. “Miriam said something about this, or maybe it was about the young man who wrote the letter to Allie. Some kid named ‘Seth’, I think, who had gone off to fight in World War I.”

John immediately took interest in this information, careful in setting the locket down and unfolding the letter. Using the magnifier again, the faded penmanship became decipherable to his older eyes. He read the contents while David stood by him listening. Miriam had been right. The boy, Seth Sullivan, promised to marry Allie as soon as his enlistment ended.

Knowing the two items spanned at most a four-year period from 1914 to 1918, they now had a smaller window to focus on. Reinvigorated by the hope they drew nearer to learning Allie’s full identity, John joined David back at the table; opening the last box while David finished scouring through the 1918 ledger.

“
Ah, hell,” sighed David, once he reached the November 1918 entries. He read a little bit more and then looked over at John sitting across from him. “There’s a note here about a community service being held at the Missionary Baptist church, which I take is not the same church these documents came from, because it mentions another Sunday evening service to follow ‘in this building’ after the other one finished.”

John nodded to confirm it true.

“
Anyway, the service was to ‘honor the soldiers lost in the fight to keep Europe free from tyranny’, and attached to the page is an announcement listing nearly thirty names of the men who died overseas,” he continued. “In the middle of the list is the name ‘Thomas Seth Sullivan’. It might not be the same kid, but I doubt it. You said so yourself, that the community never grew beyond six hundred people.”

John asked to see the ledger and the announcement, and after David handed it to him, he agreed it had to be the same young man.

“
Well, I guess it explains why only her name is carved on the oak tree where Miriam and I had our picnic.”

“
A broken heart can be a terrible burden,” agreed John. “Especially for a female growing up back then, when women were considered old maids by their early twenties.”

David looked up, surprised and unaware of that fact. Since John had already set the journal down, busy rummaging through his box, he moved on to 1917’s ledger. After another fruitless search, he picked up the ledger from 1916. From January through April, there were no significant entries. In May, however, he found something of note. Beneath an ornate Mother’s Day announcement, which took place on May 14
^th
, were two other loose pages stuck together by either some glue or other adhesive. From the look of how the pages mashed onto each other, it looked like it might have happened by accident, perhaps when something spilled onto the ledger and seeped down onto the pages.

The adhesive had hardened to where one couldn’t open the pages without tearing them. Not wanting to damage something which had value based on its age alone, he asked John to see if he could separate them. At first, he didn’t have much success either, and when the pages began to tear, David suggested they just move on. Suddenly the pages pulled apart, one falling to the floor while John held the other in his hand.

John looked astonished as he read the page he held while David picked up the other from the floor. Since John hadn’t finished yet, David looked at the other page. A memo detailing a meeting held the day after Mother’s Day, May 15
^th
, 1916, his mouth soon dropped open. The ongoing search for a girl who disappeared Sunday night, the meeting had been called by the pastor and the girl’s parents to organize a wider search for her whereabouts. The girl’s name: Allie McCormick.

“
I think I found her!” he announced excitedly, while reading other details.

The memo further described Allie as ‘the eldest daughter of Samuel and Esther McCormick, age seventeen’. Members from all three churches in the area had gathered, with the intent to search throughout Cades Cove until they found her. He held out the page to John, feeling like there might be light at the end of this hellish tunnel after all. Meanwhile, John finished reading the page he held in his hand. Unlike David, he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“
I think you’re definitely correct about finding Allie’s identity,” said John, evenly. “But before you get too excited, you need to read this.”

David stepped over to where John stood. David’s smile also faded. The page dealt with the same incident, but from another meeting several days later on Friday, May 19
^th
1916. A call to arms to find two local young men at any cost, who hadn’t been seen since the disappearance of Allie McCormick, their names were Zachariah and Billy Ray Hobson, and a sub note listed the older Hobson, Billy Ray, as a convicted felon.

“
Shit!”
Not believing his eyes, David carefully scanned the details a second time.

“
They definitely are the same first names you mentioned this morning,” said John, having finished reviewing the other page’s contents.

“
Yeah, they are,” whispered David.

“
And the brothers’ last name is similar to yours. Although I doubt a spirit would use that as a reason to connect with the living.”